Outbrain Acquires Scribit to Form a Content Marketing Union

According to a blog posting from Outbrain Co-founder and CEO Yoran Golai, “Our mission at Outbrain is to delight people with great content recommendations while giving publishers and brands the ability to reach a highly engaged audience.”

To that end, Outbrain automatically offers content consumers recommendations for individually relevant content, which can include revenue-generating content from other sites.

Making Content Marketing Robust

In addition, Outbrain also maintains a network of more than 300 online publishers for potential content syndication and provides insight into user content and media strategies. In his blog posting, Golai states, “Adding a content curation platform to our product portfolio will help brands develop more robust content marketing strategies and provide an additional revenue stream for our publishing partners.”

In August, CMSWire ran an article profiling Scribit that gives some good insight into what exactly Outbrain is getting from this acquisition. Most importantly, Scribit creates a content repository right on a user’s branded site, including those in key digital landing locales like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

The company said it's the first web-based content marketing platform that helps businesses instantly publish and share (on social platforms) "relevant and credible articles," without sending customers away. The idea is to boost time on the local digital property by hosting rather than simply linking away those valuable customer eyeballs.

“Currently, when you share third party content, you are pushing consumers away to other sites to read it,” Scribit CEO Gregg Freishtat told CMSWire. “Now, with Scribit's premium content, you can have a depth and breadth of content on your site and social pages as easily as friending someone on Facebook."

Outbrain Moves beyond Buying Out Competition

In his blog entry, Golai also mentions this is Outbrain’s second acquisition, following the purchase of recommendations engine provider Surphace from AOL in February 2011. As pointed out in an article from Israeli business publication Globes, “Surphace was basically a competitor that also developed a recommendations engine.” Surphace also brought clients including AOL, AllThingsD, Lonely Planet and The Los Angeles Times.

In comparison, Globes says “the acquisition of Scribit brings Outbrain a supplementary product,” and also mentions that Surphace sold for a low (undisclosed) price, as Scribit probably will, as well. With US$ 35 million in funding and an eye to supplement its existing functionality rather than simply acquire companies offering a similar product, Outbrain will be worth watching to see what direction it intends to take content discovery automation.